The World Wide Web has been recognized as a vast reservoir of information. There are literally terabytes of highly valuable documents and other files on the Internet and other networks.
Such a vast resource provides businesses, researchers, and consumers with information never available to them in the past. However, while a vast quantity of information is available on the Internet, finding information with sufficient precision to address specific questions has remained difficult and expensive.
Attempts have been made to provide tools that will assist users in locating information on the Internet. The more common tools include search engines that crawl network sites. These software programs are often programmed to follow universal resource locator (URL) links collecting information from Websites they visit.
While these search tools provide a much-needed service to the Internet user, they remain limited in their usefulness. For example, today's businesses seek more than simply a location for general information. Businesses desire the ability to use the network to answer dynamic strategic marketing questions, monitor competitors, identify new opportunities, and analyze trends. Unfortunately, while the current search tools provide listings or pointers to locations on the Internet that may have helpful information, the information is often not at a level of precision necessary to answer today's complex business questions.
In the past, due to the complexity of the business questions being asked, businesses have had to pay large numbers of employees to manually execute multiple search engines, manually aggregate the results, and then manually extract the relevant data from those results. Finally, employees would have to format the extracted data so that it could be used by the business. While this may provide businesses with more precise results, it remained an overwhelming, expensive, and slow approach to finding answers to complex business questions.
Alternatively, businesses have expended massive amounts of time and labor in developing custom single query software programs in an attempt to take advantage of the information available on the Internet, and improve the precision of the searches. The development of these custom single queries is often long, tedious, and requires continual labor to monitor the results. Because these software programs are often written to address a particular business question, businesses must continually invest large quantities of money for each novel question raised. The result is that businesses must invest heavily in maintaining skilled programmers, computing resources.
Finally, businesses that have invested heavily in commercially available analysis software programs seek to take advantage of those programs to analyze the results from Internet queries. However, the information from the queries is typically not in a format that the analysis programs can readily use.